Read Genesis 42
Key Verse: “36 Joseph is no more and Simeon is no more and now you want to take Benjamin. Everything is against me!”
Observation: Joseph has been sold to slavery in Egypt. His brothers lied that a wild animal must have eaten him. God raises Joseph up to be over all of Egypt. Joseph’s brothers are sent to Egypt to buy food that Joseph has collected. Joseph accuses them of being spies and they claim to be honest men. He demands they leave one brother behind while they go get Joseph’s only blood brother Benjamin. This brother, Simeon, is now left for dead. The brothers go back and just chalk up another loss and do not return for some time (at least until all the grain they had, had run out which could have been months or maybe up to a year. I also find the phrase “Everything is against me!” interesting.
Application: We have a propensity to make bad situations worse. In the midst of doing so, we then blame the universe “everything is against me”. When you step back and look at this whole situation, Jacob was a mess, he fathered poorly, he held beauty contests with sex games involved between his wives, and he showed favoritism to his wives and their children. Needless to say, this is a pretty dysfunctional home and now he blames the universe for all his problems – “everything is against me.” Wow if we don’t do the same thing. We make our own messes and then place blame outside of ourselves. I wonder if we would have the same reaction to our own lives if we simply stepped back and took a bird’s eye view of our lives. There is another HUGE application in all of this: God still uses Jacob’s dysfunctional family for His glory and His good. I believe Joseph understood this, “what you meant for evil, God used for good, the saving of many lives.” What if in the middle of our self-created messes God is raising up something good? We can’t know that in the middle of the mess, but God does. We must trust and follow Him and not wallow in the sorrow of our mess.
Prayer: Father, help me to live each day for you and take each day one at a time. I am learning a lesson right now I think you are teaching, “Just do what you know to do today and let Me worry about the future.”
